FGCU is sixth No. 15 seed in tourney history to upset a No. 2 seed

PHILADELPHIA 
The Florida Gulf Coast basketball players held their jerseys after the final buzzer so everyone could see the green “FGCU” embroidered across their chests.

Two hours earlier, those letters were irrelevant. Those letters are now forever in NCAA Tournament lore.

Fifteenth-seeded Florida Gulf Coast, or FGCU, pulled off one of the biggest upsets in tournament history with a 78-68 win over second-seeded Georgetown on Friday night to advance to Sunday’s third round.

“I told our team before the game that Georgetown is ranked eighth in the country. But after you get out on the court for two or three minutes, you’ll realize that you’re just as good, if not better, than this team,” coach Andy Enfield said. “And we did that. We didn’t play great in the first half, but we realized, ‘Hey, if we play, we can win this game.’ ”

The annual appeal of the NCAA Tournament is results like Friday’s at the Wells Fargo Center, where a nonpartisan crowd rallied around the underdog and cared less about their bracket and more about Goliath falling.

It was the seventh upset of a No. 2 seed by a No. 15 seed in NCAA Tournament history, and the third in two years. For Georgetown, it was their fifth consecutive NCAA Tournament appearance in which they’ve been eliminated by a double-digit seed.

“I don’t really know what to do with myself,” said FGCU’s Bernard Thompson, who scored 23 points. The Eagles’ Sherwood Brown led all scorers with 24 points.

So the American public who follows college basketball only when winter turns to spring will collectively wonder this weekend about Florida Gulf Coast. The school, founded in 1997 in Fort Myers, Fla., has an enrollment of 13,468. Enfield a former NBA assistant, is married to the former Amanda Marcum, once a top supermodel.

On the court, the Eagles entered halftime with a 24-22 lead that seemed impressive at the time, although Florida Gulf Coast did not believe it was playing well. Enfield said they played Georgetown’s style at that point before shifting to “FGCU” basketball — fast breaks, alley-oops, three-pointers.

Then the lead swelled to as many as 19 points in the second half. They hit four three-pointers after halftime and made 56.5 percent of their shots.

The exclamation point on the win was an alley-oop from Brett Comer to Chase Fieler while the clock dipped below two minutes. It served as an appropriate punctuation for the onslaught. They did not just win; they won with style.

“It’s very exciting to be in the position we’re in right now,” Brown said. “No one had given us anything. It means that much more that we had to go out there and earn it, take what we feel was ours.”